Experts and Artists Share the Ways New Rappers Are Finding Success These Days

Experts and Artists Share the Ways New Rappers Are Finding Success These Days
EXPERTS AND ARTISTS SHARE THE WAYS NEW RAPPERS ARE FINDING SUCCESS THESE DAYS
XXL Staff

XXL Staff
Published: March 7, 2023
Paras Griffin/Getty Images/Brian Chong/Gunner Stahl
Find a Way
The path to success in hip-hop is different for every rapper: quick and fast, slow and steady, up and down. How do new artists get on these days to achieve that goal? It’s as easy as it is complex.
Words: Grant Rindner
Editor’s Note: This story will appear in the Winter 2022 issue of XXL Magazine, on stands now.

In the decades before social media, the path to mainstream success in hip-hop wasn’t easy, but it felt clearer. Rappers built meaningful fan bases in their cities and regions, breaking records with DJs and local power players before parlaying that into national attention. Today, there are seemingly infinite ways for an artist to blow up in the genre just through the internet, whether it’s scoring a TikTok hit to moving a large Instagram following into actual listeners to earning placements on top streaming playlists.

Houston rapper KenTheMan has checked every box on her rise in the hip-hop world. She built a palpable buzz in her hometown through local club shows and fostered relationships with taste-making DJs who then took her tracks on the road with them. Ken became a media fixture with a relatable story—she drove for DoorDash to support her music career—and even scored a TikTok hit with “For Me,” a bassy thumper made alongside Chase B and OMB Bloodbath.

CHASE B, OMB Bloodbath, KenTheMan - For Me (Official Video)
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It’s been a methodical ascent for Ken and her manager, Melissa Keklak, one that included a record deal with Warner Music Group subsidiary Asylum Records. It’s the kind of process that seems calculated, but according to Ken, it’s all been pretty off-the-cuff, a reflection of the increasingly diffuse paths artists in the industry are taking to reach their success. “I swear, you wouldn’t believe how unintentional my career has been,” KenTheMan tells. But it all began locally, and the rest followed.

First things first, local support still matters. Coming from a hip-hop hotbed like Houston has its advantages and drawbacks. There are scores of potential fans and a storied lineage to draw on, but also lots of other fledgling rappers competing for airspace. KenTheMan recognized that if she could build support in Houston and win over the city’s tastemakers, that would give her serious momentum for when she switched her focus to breaking nationally.

“My buzz just grew in Houston because it’s so big that I was booked every weekend just in [Houston] alone,” she recalls. “I just grabbed legs in my career to where I started flying out and doing shows in different states. I ran it up and I was able to quit my job off of Houston shows.”

While an artist doesn’t necessarily have to follow that plan these days and can achieve sudden online ubiquity without gaining on-the-ground fans, that’s still something that A&Rs want to see from prospective signings. Longtime A&R Orlando Wharton, who is now the Capitol Music Group Executive Vice President upon leaving Atlantic Records as Senior Vice President of A&R in 2022, after eight years with the label, says many young rappers fixate too early in their careers on things like playlist placements when they should still be focused on carving out an audience.

“You shouldn’t even be worried about that,” advises Wharton, who signed and developed artists like Kodak Black, Fetty Wap, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie and the late PnB Rock. “You should be worried about taking over your city first and once you take over your city, people are gonna recognize you and you’ll get to that point. You can’t skip any steps in music.”

Kodak Black - Super Gremlin [Official Music Video]
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Steven “Steve-O” Carless, Warner Records President of A&R and a key figure in the success of artists like Jeezy, Nipsey Hussle and Polo G, says he looks first for an artist’s narrative, and how they’re furthering it through their music primarily. He’s also paying attention to their footprint on various other platforms, including social media. Carless explains it gives him “a 35,000-foot concept” of where an artist is in their career and how they connect with their audience. Today, rappers are able to tell more of their stories themselves, making it deeper into their careers without needing outside help, but they’re also vying for eyes and ears in the most crowded creative economy we’ve ever seen.

“Back in a way when we would develop artists for two, three, four, five years before it gets there, but the market wasn’t moving at [the rate it is now],” Carless says. “Now you’re talking about a marketplace that has 100,000 songs a day. Where you look at 20 years ago, there were only a handful of 1,000 songs a week or even albums coming.”

Wharton thinks the nature of music consumption has altered the kinds of signings that labels are making. There are still long-term development plays—like what he did with Kodak Black, who will reportedly follow him to Capitol—but also short-term deals that can constitute rereleasing an already viral independent single or dropping a single project as a kind of trial run. At this stage of his career, Wharton isn’t looking to personally A&R one of these quick-strike acts, but he recognizes the value, and would be open to having someone under him bring them into the fold.

“I’d have somebody else sign them for the business,” he explains. “I mean, me per se, I wouldn’t sign them because I want to sign things that I can work on and make six albums with them. But as a business, I’ll send somebody to sign them, absolutely.” The A&Rs XXL spoke with for this story noted that there is something of a divide between the field’s veterans and its up-and-comers. Both groups of people will rely on streaming data and trends, including how often an artist’s songs are used to make TikToks, and their social media engagement, but Wharton believes as the industry has changed, some of the crucial soft skills of A&R work are not being properly honed.

“When I came up, an A&R was somebody who hung out with rappers and got records done and got shit done and signed people and made shit happen,” Wharton expresses of the early days. “Now people get an A&R confused with somebody who does research. Everybody thinks that just because you can do research, you’re an A&R and that’s absolutely false.”

Statistics from streaming to social media may keep some A&Rs invested in an artist they want to sign, but rappers themselves are equally invested in where they end up. Social media scouting can also be a two-way street. Famously, Lil Nas X decided to sign with Columbia Records in part after looking through the Instagram profile of label chairman Ron Perry. It’s a method for an artist and their team to check a label’s track record, and see whether aligning themselves is a prudent move for the future or makes sense.

Selim Bouab, a longtime A&R and current co-president of 300 Entertainment, says he’s heard from artists he’s scouted that they’re receiving label offers without a face-to-face meeting. He believes this ultimately does a disservice to the artist and to the A&R team tasked with building them into a star.

“We spend as much time as we can with them because it’s our job to give a vision to the rest of the company,” Bouab explains. “As an A&R, if I signed an act and said, ‘I don’t know shit about them. The rest of the team will go work on it,’ people aren’t gonna buy that. People aren’t gonna believe that. You have to really share your vision and be profound in which direction you want to go in.”

There is a stigma around the industry that record labels aren’t developing talent, waiting instead to swoop in once an artist has built up significant buzz themselves through social media. As with much in the music industry, that’s not quite the truth. Artists can have more leverage now than they would in the past, and

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